TerraFirma raises $115M for remote-controlled excavators

The interesting thing about TerraFirma's $115M round is not the size, it is who wrote the check and how the company is set up. CNBC reported Kleiner Perkins leading a $100M Series A into the Austin startup, with Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Magnetar Capital, PEAK6 and a stack of angels tied to SpaceX, Anduril and Hadrian topping the round out to $115M.

The company, founded in 2024 by former SpaceX engineers Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness, retrofits excavators, dozers, loaders, rollers and skid steers for remote operation, with a command-and-control center on one end and, in some cases, an Xbox controller on the other. Above that sits AI-enabled pre-construction software. Recent commercial pilots include site preparation and grading for a new Starbucks in North Austin, a sports arena in Spicewood, and a power substation in New Braunfels. Small jobs, not moonshots, which is arguably the point.

Construction is one of the few large industries where labor productivity has moved sideways for years, and the operator shortage has kept wages high and timelines long. If a remote seat with a joystick can safely run a dozer from another county, the unit economics of dirt work shift, and so does the exposure of the heavy-equipment OEMs currently selling that iron with no software attached. Kleiner Perkins partner Josh Coyne framed TerraFirma as 'clearly where the industry is headed,' which is the sort of thing a lead investor says, but his line about 'securing government and commercial contracts' is the part worth underlining.

The honest caveat is what the reporting doesn't give you. There is no revenue figure, no contract values, and no breakdown of how much of the 'semi-autonomous' stack is genuine autonomy versus a skilled human on a screen. The company also plans to hire 300 employees over the next year and stand up both a Texas factory and a mission control center, which is an aggressive scale-up for a Series A. A single serious safety incident with heavy iron under remote control could be its own regulatory reset.

The forward-looking bit worth watching is who else moves. If TerraFirma's substation and grid-adjacent work lands during the current data-center build-out, the interesting question is whether Caterpillar, Komatsu or John Deere respond by opening their own control stacks, or by refusing to sell iron to the retrofitters at all.